Protecting Arizona (Special Forces: Operation Alpha)

by Holt, Desiree

  Luca turned to face his segundo. He knew the man paid attention to every detail but he always double and triple checked.

  “You saw the sister arrive?”

  “I did. She was only there a few minutes. When she came out, she didn’t even go to the motel office to see if anyone had seen or heard anything. I am sure she called the police, though, because not long after she left two patrol cars arrived. And fifteen minutes after that a car with what looked to be two detectives showed up.”

  “No telling what she will do next. Perhaps even call her boss. I need to know what she is planning to do.”

  Octavio nodded. “I put three teams on her at once so we’d know what she is doing at all times. I had a cleanup team was waiting until after the cops showed, and I sent them after her instead.”

  “Good, good, good. I have to know what she is doing every minute from now on. Damn it all, I’ll bet she’s after Ruby. Fucking sister.”

  Just saying the word “sister” left a bitter taste in his mouth. He still could not believe that the stupid bitch he married had a sister she hadn’t told hm about, much less one who was a DEA agent. Or maybe that was why she’d withheld it. He’d done his best to keep knowledge of his drug business off his wife’s radar, although, truth be told, as beautiful as she was, Florida had not been blessed with an overload of brains. Not only hadn’t it mattered to him—he wasn’t looking for a conversationalist, after all—but it also meant she wouldn’t stick her nose into his business and ask too many questions.

  In point of fact, she rarely asked anything. She enjoyed being his wife, spending his money, going fancy places, wearing expensive clothes and jewels. Driving an expensive car. She assumed he made it all selling his big motor homes, a business that did extremely well all on its own.

  But his business as a distributor for several cartels was where the real wealth was, and he made sure to keep it far away from her. How did he know she would return home early that day and rush to his office, aware he was home early? Or that she would overhear him discussing details of a shipment and the necessary disposal of someone trying to muscle in on his territory. Or that she would even have the brains to snoop around. Twice more Octavio had caught her trying to overhear conversations.

  He would have thought her not smart enough to figure things out, but her attitude had changed. Sometimes she seemed almost afraid of him. He finally confronted her, asking her if there was a problem they needed to talk about. She of course denied it, but he hadn’t gotten to where he was by not knowing when someone was lying to him. He was trying to decide the best way to handle the situation, but before he could do anything, she had grabbed Ruby and run.

  When he’d first cast his eye on Florida Brandon, he’d had Octavio run a check on her, something he did with every woman, even one he just spent a few hours with. As the organizer and distributor of merchandise in Central Florida for a small group of powerful cartels, it was important he take great care about who he was with. That he was always on the alert for someone sent to spy on him or worse, eliminate him. He just hadn’t thought this was the case here. In his eyes she was a beautiful woman who looked good when he took her out and didn’t ask too many questions.

  He should have dug deeper into Florida’s life before he married her, but who the fuck would have thought to? She was a very pretty, very sexy, not-too-smart piece of ass who made good arm candy. She fit into his lifestyle. He’d spent a fortune grooming her, buying a new wardrobe, sending her to a salon for a new hairstyle. All the things that made her look like the wife of a very rich executive. People complimented him on his beautiful wife, food for his ego. She didn’t ask many questions, and as long as he threw money and compliments at her, she was fine. And he had to admit, the sex was off the charts. He loved an uninhibited woman.

  The arrival of Ruby was a bonus. He came from a large family, and he wanted one for himself. He doted on the little girl, showering her with gifts and taking her special places. He could feel the resentment sparking from Florida when he took his daughter out by himself, but he wanted to build that father-daughter relationship he’d seen with so any of his friends.

  Maybe he should have included his wife more in those outings. Paid more attention to what was bothering her. But he’d been juggling a lot of balls in the air. The volume of his distribution business had grown as the cartels increased the amount of goods they shipped to him, and he was under a lot of pressure to get everything to the appropriate people on the right timetable. He’d mentally pushed Florida off to the side while he took care of business.

  But then, by a weird accident of fate, Octavio learned that Florida had a sister who was an agent with the DEA. They had a paid informant with the DEA who was also, always, under threat of danger to her family. When she had alerted him months ago that he had come onto the DEA radar and that a team was just then beginning to focus on him, he’d insisted she give him their names so he could check them out. He had his top computer specialist run a check on them.

  And was shocked at one of the results.

  The last thing he expected to find was a woman who was his wife’s sister. That changed everything, as far as Luca was concerned. Octavo had pulled the records from Florida’s cell for the past year and discovered she had had sporadic contact with a number that traced back to Arizona Hunt. Contacts that she kept from him. It saddened him at the same time it made him angry that his wife was no longer to be trusted.

  He had someone watching her at all times, keeping an eye on her without being obvious. He had a tracker placed on her car, and his tech guy regularly tapped into her cell and pulled her call history. Sometimes he deliberately took Ruby out without his wife, setting the pattern that he was the major parent in her life. When he finally got rid of Florida—and he knew he’d have to sooner or later—he hoped it would only be a minor blip in her life. As long as she had her padre, she’d be fine.

  He marked his time, monitoring Florida and waiting for the appropriate moment to lower the boom, when something happened to escalate his timetable. Then another phone call told him he could not wait any longer. He was on the phone with one of his “clients,” and Octavio discovered Florida standing outside the door to his den. Her excuse that she was going to talk to him about dinner didn’t resonate with him. Luca had no idea how much she’d heard, but he knew he had to do something about it. If she had information, she could threaten to tell her sister if he didn’t do things she wanted.

  As if a piece of ass could threaten him, even if she was his wife.

  But this morning had been the tipping point. Octavio had been monitoring Florida even more closely and saw her sneaking out of the house with Ruby.

  “Let her go,” Luca had told him, “but monitor the tracker on her car. Find her and bring them both back to the house. Handle Ruby with care and make up some kind of plausible story.”

  Once she was home again, he could decide what to do about her. She’d have to be gotten rid of, but he needed to think of the best way to do it. Octavio sent two teams to handle things, following them in his own car, just to make sure nothing went wrong. As he’d told Luca, they were momentarily startled when Florida left her car in a parking lot, went into a coffee shop, and waited. They certainly hadn’t wanted to grab her there. Plus, they needed to know if she was meeting someone.

  As Octavio described it, after a short wait an Uber pulled up, and Florida and Ruby had exited the coffee shop and climbed into the car, which took them to the motel. After that, it had been simple. The men had knocked on the door of Florida’s motel room. The moment she answered, they had moved swiftly. One of the men slammed his hand over Florida’s mouth and immobilized her against his body. The other had grabbed Ruby, who, lucky for them was sound asleep.

  “I think Florida may have given her a little something so she wouldn’t make a fuss at everything that was going to happen.”

  “Lucky for us,” Luca commented. “She didn’t wake up until the men brought her back here. If she remembers
anything I can tell her it was a bad dream. But the rest apparently did not go off as well?”

  Octavio shook his head. “While Carlos grabbed Ruby, Javier attempted to immobilize Florida, but she put up one hell of a fight. When she kicked him in the cojones, he just lost it, pulled out his gun, and boom. At least he had a silencer on the gun that took care of any noise. The good news is they were in and out in a few very brief minutes.”

  “And now Ruby is upstairs in her room, awake from her ‘nap,’ playing with her dollhouse and wondering where her mama is.” He rubbed his jaw. “It’s up to me to convince her it was all a bad dream.”

  “It works out better this way,” Octavio agreed.

  “It does indeed.” He paused. “The gun that was used is unregistered?”

  “Of course. They broke it down and disposed of it where it will never be found. No matter what the bitch sister thinks, she can’t prove a thing.”

  Vasquez nodded again

  “I will be properly saddened and distraught when the police come to make the official notification. But tell everyone to be alert. They will try to muscle someone into giving them any kind of an opening to investigate. Was I abusive? Did I have a mistress and Florida got in the way? Did we argue a lot? You know the drill.”

  “I do. I’ll be sure the men understand what to do. The police will find nothing but a grieving widower and his saddened business staff. And, of course, the poor little motherless girl.”

  “One more thing, mi amigo. Now I think we must find a way to get rid of the sister. The police will surely discover her. and who the fuck knows what garbage she will tell them about Florida and our marriage. And it has to be done very carefully. No suspicion can be our way. If you can make her disappear altogether, so much the better.

  ”And if we can’t?”

  “Then it has to look like either an accident or drug dealers taking their revenge on her as a DEA agent.”

  “All right.” He rubbed his jaw, frowning. “Then you will find this very interesting.”

  Vasquez’s jaw tightened, and a muscle ticked in his cheek. “Tell me you sent someone to follow her.”

  “I did. The tag team I had waiting across from the motel. I stayed to continue monitoring the situation.”

  “Have they reported back to you.?”

  Octavio nodded. “You’ll find this very interesting. She stopped at a strip mall and made a call on her cell. Then she headed for that big mall where she met some hulk on a motorcycle and they went to her place.”

  “Who the hell could that be? Find out and keep an eye on them at all times. Whoever he is, we cannot let him get in our way.”

  “I’ll set up my usual, three teams, so no car is ever in her line of sight for more than short periods of time. Once we get a handle on what, if anything, she is going to do, I’ll figure the best way to accomplish this quietly. Perhaps an acceptable accident.”

  “Take care of it.” He blew out a breath. “Now. We have another equally urgent problem.”

  Octavio frowned. “What could supersede everything else?“

  Vasquez grimaced as if he had swallowed something bad. “The DEA is getting ready to make its move. We’ve known for some time they were heading in this direction, but I didn’t want to change anything until we had a date certain. Last week I learned we had a short time frame. My source tells me it could be within a week.”

  “Are you positive your source is accurate?”

  Vasquez gave a rough laugh. “As long as we make sure her son continues to enjoy our hospitality she will be.”

  Octavio shook his head. “We can’t hang on to him forever.”

  “As we’ve done before, we make sure he is well taken care of so when he talks on the phone to his mama he eases her mind. He knows if he tries to get away, we will kill her, and she knows if she fucks up we will kill him.”

  “And when this is over?”

  Vasquez shrugged. ”We will kill both of them.”

  “What about the merchandise? Surely you aren’t going to process it as usual and allow them to confiscate it.”

  “No.” Vasquez shook his head. “I don’t want to move anything yet because I know they have eyes on the dealership. Perhaps we will have three delivery dates this time and confuse them. I don’t believe they actually know the details of our method of distribution, so we will watch carefully and be ready to move at a moment’s notice. I make sure to get daily reports from our source.”

  “There will still be a raid, you know,” Octavio reminded him. “They won’t cancel it, especially since they have no idea we know about it. Have you thought how they will handle it when they learn about Florida’s death? You know they will. Among other things, it’s bound to be on the news. Here you are, the grieving widower, planning a funeral. Will they move in the middle of all that?”

  “Probably not,” Vasquez answered. “I am sure sometime today I will get a visit from the policía, and we will go from there. This will give us more time to rearrange how we handle the deliveries, too.” He paused. “We need to make sure none of this touches Ruby. I don’t want her caught in the middle of this. It’s bad enough I have to tell her that her mother is dead.”

  “She’ll remember leaving the house with her mother. Everything after that will be a blur. Lucky for us Florida decided to give her something to help her nap so she would be easy to handle,” Octavio told him. “We can convince her that it was a dream. I know we can do that. That’s the way you play it with the cops. Florida left by herself. And keep Ruby away from them.”

  “Just in case, I think it best to move her. I also need to decide where would be the best place for her.”

  “Adella and I would be happy to have her stay with us for a while,” Octavio told him. “She always enjoys herself with our children, and Alicia would be ecstatic to be able to play with her.”

  Luca Vasquez was not an emotional man, but he and Octavo had been together a long time and weathered many things together. In his business you could not survive without the right person having your back. Octavio was that man. Luca shook hands with him, tightening the grasp briefly in a tiny show of emotion.

  “Thank you. Let’s see what happens after the police show up at the house.”

  “I’ve asked our contact with the local police if he can keep us in the loop, but there is a big problem.”

  Luca clenched his jaw for a moment. “What’s that?”

  “It happened outside the city limits because that’s where the motel she chose is located. The sheriff’s office is in charge, and there are no open doors there at all.”

  “Fuck.” Luca began pacing, something he seldom did. “We should have taken care of her before she left. No, forget I said that.” He waved a hand in the air. “I needed more time to decide how to handle her, and I just didn’t get it. I know there wasn’t any way to stop her until she got to her destination. At least not without creating an incident of some kind along the way.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Octavio assured him. “I’m thinking about reaching out to some of your legitimate acquaintances to see if they can get information. It plays well. The distraught husband. The grieving family. It would help if you knew how the investigation was going, and you can find out about that.”

  “Yes.” Luca nodded his approval. “Perfect.” He studied the other man. “I have no idea what I would do without you, and I don’t think I ever want to find out.”

  “And you never will,” Octavio assured him.

  “Meanwhile, we have business to attend to. Let’s go over once again the upcoming distribution schedule and the list of drivers. We must prepare for all eventualities. We will vary things a little but not enough to cause a problem, especially with our distributors.”

  “What should we do about Arizona Hunt?”

  That is a good question.” Vasquez rolled it around in his mind, not wanting to end up with a knee-jerk reaction. If he had his way, he’d grab her and dismember her very slowly. Although he knew that s
he and Florida had limited contact, Luca was positive Arizona was the one who had been putting ideas in her sister’s head about taking her daughter and leaving.

  Our daughter.

  But he had to be smart. He didn’t need anything throwing extra suspicion on him. He knew the fucking cops would be at his doorstep before long, and he had to be clean as a whistle. He could not be tied to Arizona Hunt in any way.

  “We must plan for the right moment,” he said at last, “so keep an eye on her. We are going to have to dispose of her, that is a given. God knows what will come up if the cops get a chance to talk to her. Even the littlest thing can throw a big monkey wrench, but we must pick the appropriate moment. And it must look like an accident. Set up cars to tag team her, so she will have no suspicions anyone is following her. We must keep it all under the radar. I cannot say this enough times. I must not draw undue attention to myself with this DEA thing hanging over our heads, so we have to be careful.”

  Octavio nodded. “As you wish, but maybe think—”

  “I’m serious, amigo. Do nothing. I don’t need to call down the wrath of the DEA on us, especially at this particular moment in time. But we have to get rid of this woman.”

  He reached for a cigar on his desk, clipped the tip with his solid gold cigar clipper, and took a moment to light it. Dragging the taste of it into his mouth, he slowly exhaled a stream of smoke.

  “Understood.” Octavio cleared his throat. “Rest assured it will be taken care of.” He paused. “Luca, you need to go about your business as if your wife simply left to do something she does that is not out of the ordinary. You are shocked, distraught, and destroyed that the woman you love more than life itself has met this horrible fate.”

  Vasquez nodded. “I’m prepared for that. If the policía try to question others here in the house, especially Fernanda, make sure they all tell the same story. Florida and Ruby went to have a special mother/daughter shopping trip. Even as young as she is, Ruby loves going to the stores and trying on clothes. Make sure that everyone says the same thing.”